The Livery That Melted Manhattan: Cadillac Enters F1

Cadillac might’ve quietly banked several days of mileage already, but it’s waited until the biggest advertising real estate in American sport to properly plant its flag in Formula 1.

During the fourth quarter of Sunday night’s Super Bowl broadcast, F1’s newest outfit — the championship’s 11th team for 2026 — rolled out a national-scale introduction in the form of a slick, mission-statement advert. It was pure Americana: cinematic pacing, big-room rhetoric, and the kind of line you could practically hear echoing off a hangar wall about choosing the hard path on purpose.

Then came the first proper look at what Cadillac wants the grid to associate with it: a stark black-and-grey livery, mirrored from side to side so the car looks inverted depending on where you stand. It’s minimalist, intentionally so, and it reads like a brand that’s trying to look serious before it tries to look loud. Notably, Cadillac didn’t disclose the name of the car alongside the launch — an odd omission on a night designed to be anything but subtle.

The team framed the timing as the start of something rather than the finish of a reveal cycle. And that’s the point: Cadillac isn’t treating this as a one-hit launch, it’s building a rolling sequence of moments aimed squarely at a home audience that doesn’t need to understand DRS deltas to buy into a story.

The next beat is set for New York. After the Super Bowl spot, Cadillac’s attention turns to Times Square, where the car has been sitting since 7 February inside a “frost” installation — with the ice slowly thawing ahead of the public reveal. It’s theatre, obviously, but it’s also message discipline: Cadillac wants this to feel like an event, not a press release.

Dan Towriss, CEO of Cadillac Formula 1 Team Holdings, leaned into that dual-purpose approach.

“The unveiling of a livery in Formula 1 is an important moment as it is a reflection of the team’s identity,” Towriss said. “The reveal at the Super Bowl and in Times Square represents both a launch moment and an invitation for fans to join in our journey.

“The Super Bowl spot will take the team into millions of homes, while the Cadillac Countdown will give a front-row view in one of the busiest areas in the US.”

There’s a smart bit of positioning in there. Cadillac is effectively saying: we’re not just arriving in Formula 1, we’re arriving with a mainstream American identity, and we’re going to sell it in places where Americans actually are — their living rooms, and the brightest public billboard on the continent.

One other detail in the background of all this is the streaming tie-in teased in Cadillac’s own announcement: the team says its season “kicks off March 7th” on Apple TV in the US. That’s a neat piece of modern F1 ecosystem thinking — the sport as content pipeline — and it fits the wider way new projects are being packaged in 2026. Cadillac clearly wants the entry to be followed, not merely noticed.

And then there’s the driver line-up, which gives the whole thing a slightly different texture than the typical new-team story. Cadillac has brought Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas back after both sat out the 2025 season, with each returning from retirement to spearhead the debut campaign. That’s not a romantic gamble on rookies; it’s a pragmatic choice designed to reduce the unknowns when virtually everything else is unknown.

Perez and Bottas also bring something marketing departments love: recognisable names that can handle the spotlight while the engineers do the unglamorous work of chasing lap time. For a team that’s just bought a Super Bowl slot and is staging a Times Square reveal, that matters. You don’t spend that kind of money to be anonymous by April.

Still, the livery launch — and the sheer scale of the rollout — shouldn’t distract from the reality that the hard yards start now. Every new team talks about “journey” and “mission”, but Formula 1 is a brutal editor. Once the season starts, the only story that survives is performance, and there’s no amount of branding that can cover up a car that’s difficult to drive or slow in a straight line.

For now, though, Cadillac’s done what it needed to do: it’s made itself feel like a major player before it’s turned a wheel in anger.

The mission begins now. Introducing Cadillac Formula 1 ® Team’s first livery.

Our season kicks off March 7th streaming on@AppleTVin the US.pic.twitter.com/OlBx4jPbAI

— Cadillac Formula 1 Team (@Cadillac_F1)February 9, 2026